ABSTRACT
The standard image of the fierce and savage Viking enjoys hallowed status still in the Irish historical imagination.3 They have even become the subject of a very popular television series (‘Vikings’), which is at least a step up from the mere ‘walkon part’ that they played twenty years ago in a television commercial for a wellknown Danish lager! Wild hordes of bloodthirsty and merciless savages cascade from their dragon-ships in search of defenceless women and children, booty, and church treasures (an image that the television series has done nothing to dispel), but that is probably as far as any would-be revisionism has come – in the public mind, at any rate. One of the first attempts, nearly fifty years ago, at a considered review of the Viking period in Ireland provoked an outraged letter to the Irish Times, protesting at ‘the move on foot at present to whitewash the Vikings and play down their depredations’.4 The old image of the heathen raiders, eager to put their Christian Irish victims to the sword and their churches to the torch, survives still in popular art, along with that other Viking trademark, the horned helmet, which has no historical basis whatever.
